Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Dropbox

Dropbox is a file hosting service that offers cloud storage, file synchronization along with client software. It allows users to create a special folder on each of their computers, which it then synchronizes so that the folder appears (with the same contents) on each of the synced computers, regardless of the computer used to view it. Files placed in this folder are accessible through a website and mobile phone applications.




Dropbox provides client software for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Android, iOS, BlackBerry OS and web browsers.





Business Model



Dropbox uses a freemium business model, where users are offered a free account with a set storage size and paid subscriptions for accounts with more capacity.



Files uploaded via the web site are limited to not more than 300 MB per file. To prevent free users from creating multiple linked free accounts, Dropbox includes the content of shared folders when totaling the amount of space used on the account.





Technologies Used



Both the Dropbox server and desktop client software are primarily written in Python. The desktop client uses GUI toolkits such as wxWidgets and Cocoa.



Dropbox uses Amazon's S3 storage system to store the files. It also uses SSL transfers for synchronization and stores the data via AES-256 encryption.



Other than synchronization & sharing, Dropbox client also supports personal storage, revision history (so files deleted from the Dropbox folder may be recovered from any of the synced computers), multi-user version control (enabling several users to edit and re-post files without overwriting versions) etc.



References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropbox_(service)

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